In Maker Faire Rome, we will present our most recent project: Roborig – a telepresence robot that enables users to feel immersed in a remote, augmented reality.

Telepresence, refers to the technology that enables the feeling of being present in a remote location, is finally becoming an accessible possibility, at least visually, thanks to the combination of 360-videos and virtual reality headsets such as Oculus Rift. Our project aims to enrich this experience by including stereo vision, depth information, mixed reality, and hand-tracking to enable practical telepresence applications.

Our exhibit is located in A21 (pav. 7). Come and visit us with Roborig!!

Sissa in Festa is one of those outreach programs of Sissa. It aims to bring the fundamental sciences that are under study at the institue closer to locals, be it families with children or students and academics in other fields.

The theme this year is Smells and Stories. Right There are a lot of amazing workshops organised already. Particularly note worthy for us are the ones on coffee and wine, two products whose connoisseurs could describe a world of variety solely with their noses.

Although we might be too late, we would like to bring VR to this year’s Sissa in Festa. We have a VR game in-progress that could teach you the molecular structure of odours. It is a Leap Motion + Oculus DK2 setting. Stay tuned!

Trieste Mini Maker Faire is a very lively gathering you should not miss if you are in town! It will be hosted at the Miramare Campus of ICTP like the last years. The venue is accessible with bus number 6 with a very scenic bus ride of the sea and woods.

We are planning to showcase the Dust Runner there at the Mittelab stand! Still waiting to be confirmed. Stay tuned!

Some very exciting but long overdue news from your beloved Eigenstudio: we are collaborating with a very talented company, Fantastificio, to work on Virtual Reality applications!

Oculus Rift. Photo from wikipedia. It so did not fit on my little cousin due to short interocular distance

Fantastificio entered in the exciting world of 360 videos, to be experienced using a head mounted display such as Oculus Rift or Samsung GearVR. They asked us to land a hand in creating an app to visualize the videos, and Eigenstudio answered right away!

That first journey into Virtual Reality went so smooth that we instantly knew we wanted more! So we started to work on more extensive VR interactive experiences, using Unity5, UE4, GearVR Framework and whatever we needed to learn to implement what we envisioned.

The thing about virtual reality is, unlike its name suggests, it is still far from reality in many aspects, it is a very new experience, there is nothing quite like it on our daily lives. Hence VR technology lacks the easy marketing extrapolation that smartphones had, “a tiny powerful computer that fits in your pocket”. One has to experience VR to understand and create for it. Driven by immense curiosity and on-the-surface professional motivations we got ourselves an Oculus Rift DK2, a Google Cardboard, and Fantastificio was kind enough to lend us some mobile devices: See a Samsung Galaxy note 4 and a GearVR put to good use here ehhehe

Samsung GearVR with blue eyes inserted.

So as you imagine nowadays we are fully immersed. The VR world in general and our tiny role in it is quickly progressing. The list of what we have learnt, done, dream of doing is so long that one post would not even cover the surface. So I guess the most enjoyable way of sharing that with you would be to make a “Virtual Sunny Beach” app and start writing updates while sipping drinks on sand in the next weeks

Time flies dear Eigens,

From moderators to Pao?

Clockwork Puzzle is soon going to be one month old and our player number is still around 200, with no increase in sight So we decided to leave the game in the hands of one of the most critical, difficult to please, and (after their recent revolt with 160K signatures we can say surely call them so) the most vocal internet community: reddit!

But before digging further into that , let’s finish up Clockwork Puzzle analytics, last chapter: Success evaluation

Who is the better puzzle solver?

As you would remember we have already gone through the number of players in iOS vs Android breakdown, or Flurry analytics player personality types analytics in the last weeks, it is now time to get into real success measures. This week we will be using again the data we have gathered with Flurry analytics.

iOS User Path vs. Android User Path

As you can see, we have drawn here what players do when the session starts and they hit their first level of the day: Possible options are winning the level, losing the level, obviously, but also restarting the level before losing, possibly when you understand that you won’t win :-), as well as going back to main menu, or simply closing the app, or so-called end session. It is clear from above data that Android users are seeing that golden win symbol “Well done!” far more often than iOS players! Yay, success for the little Droid! But wait, other interesting behaviour patterns appear as well:

After a win

Android players seem to enjoy a winning streak: After winning the level at the beginning of a session, they right away start the next level 91% of the time, and show 44% success in winning also this next level (data not shown). So, in over simplified terms, Android users are more likely to keep playing as long as they win and win as long as they play. Hence we can say rewarded practice makes perfect in the puzzle world too.

This blogpost loves you.

Instead a win means slightly less to iOS players in terms of motivation to carry on (only 85% go on to the next level). They tend to more frequently play again the same level (huh?), or simply quit. But what happens to iOS players that win and keep playing? Not surprisingly, success rates are also lower than Droids: On the face of this new level challenge only 35% of the iOS players score a win. So we get it, it is fun to win, or better put, a player should win almost half the time to keep playing. As expected, nobody likes stalling. It is demotivating when it happens often, and likely to cause people to give up.. But what iOS players apparently do not notice is that, looking at the overall picture, their performance increase drastically the second time around: While at the initial session start they could pass their first level only 1 out of 4 times, if they continue to the next level it becomes success 1 out of 3 times. This is a lot better progress than the Android players who show at the first level of the session about 40% success and at the second level 44%. Still better though, so both groups are learning little by little at each session but iOS players are learning faster.

When we lose

Not everyone is a graceful loser, indeed. But Clockwork Puzzle player is different than what we imagine internet average is: At the level start, we see that only 5% of the android and only 6% of iOS users rage quit, i.e. they would end the session, close the app when they lose. These ratios are similar to how they behave after a win. It is also interesting to see that on the face of a lose, when that horrendous “Out of Toys!” sign appears at the first level of the session, 90% of both iOS and Android users would restart! Yay for grit! Keep at it y’all! Unfortunately, our Flurry settings don’t allow us to track these unstoppable players and see whether their next tries were indeed successful. We hope so, up to that 50-50 ratio that keeps them coming back, of course

Obviously all this is a bit of an oversimplification. A serious data analysis would first require a lot more sessions than our about 3000 sessions, and would consider perhaps a level and user resolved version of the data and hopefully, it would include error bars

To the crazy ones

We doubted long before revealing this here but you should probably know: One advantage of having so few players is that player logs that also keep device model are very easy to follow. Let us explain with a scenario: If we see a log entry from an iPhone6 at 8pm starting the 16th level and after several attempts winning and ending a session, and another log entry next day again from an iPhone6 starting level 17th; it is easy to connect the dots. So sometimes we think we can follow the gameplay of some of you on a daily basis! It is super creepy, right? Think of an even worse scenario: you are a friend of one of us with a peculiar device, we meet you one day and say hey, wanna try our game? You are perhaps not very interested but out of politeness say something like “yea, I will try as soon as I can”. We don’t buy that of course and ask you to download and even play a couple of levels there and then. We could, then in principle, follow your device in the next days to come and see how you have been doing in the game, or if you have ever played, or if you were on wifi or not, hence at work or at school or out partaying downtown.

As you imagine we have not done that, but even without checking carefully some devices and entry logs were remarkable: So without any further ado, some fun stuff out of event logs and cheers to the crazy ones who played and became so noticable in our logs:

June 12th, about 6am central european time, dear iPhone 5s (GSM+CDMA), you were the first one ever to reach level 30, and you gave up after 6 tries, and missed the chance of being the very first one to finish the game both on Android and iOS

Dear Apple iPhone 4 (GSM), we have never seen someone with such determination: it has been almost a week and you keep coming back for level 19! Session after session we watch you and with that inspiration we come back to our VR projects and fight against the most annoying incompatible version issues in Unity, Oculus and GearVR software development kits. We are impressed, so much so that we decided to make a new release to be able add a hint to that very difficult level. Contact us and we will add you to the credits of this game and many others to come! Some of us personally wanna name a first born after you.

And you, Samsung Galaxy Note 3 LTE, we did not forget about you. With you we have learned that either the game controls are very non-intuitive or our tutorial probably sucks or as everyone you don’t read tutorials, or perhaps all of the above. It was in the very first days of the release and you were the player whom it took the most attempts to pass level 1. But alas, you were unstoppable afterwards! Except a couple of exceptions, you flew to level 8 like a breeze. And that is when we lost you. We waved goodbye, with your lesson on game controls in our hearts.

Back to reddit

We are all truly grateful for everyone who have played our game and gave it a go and let us know of their feedback. Overall we had a great time making the game, mostly, but also enjoyed the post-mortem analysis. However all would have been so much more fun if we had more players, more data, more people to share Ago’s and lost loved ones memories, and perhaps even developers that want to work together with us on making it a better game and extending its scope. With this possibility in mind we went to GameDev subreddit and occupied the Feedback Friday post! Feedback Friday is a special post in this subreddit where developers often exchange feedback on each others’ games. We were lucky to try out some really cute games ourselves and even had some few but awesome feedback!

Overall, reddit was not as scary as we imagined. Some tough love, but hey, we needed it. As you can read here the reactions to our store pages were consistent: Make it clear, and fancier! Apparently it is not apparent on store pages what the game is about and how it is played. Another feedback we heard on reddit as well as IRL is the nonexistent manual controls for skipping or slowing down the silent movie-like story scenes. We hear you. But we cannot promise much, as these days we are truly immersed in Virtual Reality but for sure we will come back with a new release to tackle those open loops. And the more players we have, the sooner that will be.

Until then, keep spreading the word dear Eigens and keep trying to reach further levels in the game. There are some really cute levels and toys you have not seen! Believe us when we say it, we know exactly at which level you are playing

The reason behind all the languages is indeed the analytics we have gathered based on the user data of our game Clockwork Puzzle. But language is easy to guess, instead, some of what we found out about you and your gameplay was a lot more counter-intuitive to us!

While checking some of your play logs

As you might remember in last week’s post we started the analytics with basic questions: how many people played in total, how many iOS vs Android users, and average time they spend in the game per session etc. Let me summarise what we learned in two simple points:1) Reviews and ratings are super duper important for a new game not to get lost in the search among 500 games appearing each day on the store! 2) Never release a truly unfinished beta. Yes it sounds stupid, we hear you say “hey, being unfinished is the nature of a beta release!”.. We know.. But after playing a quite unfinished beta, even your friends might be discouraged from playing the final version. Alternatively get more supportive and tolerant friends with less smartphone ADHD.*

This week we added some few more data points from the last days as well and move to more personal waters: As we analyse the results, numbers will tell what kind of internet persona you are, your “Flurry” age and gender, your secret interests which you spend most time on while nobody is looking, as well as how miserably you (or as game designers, we XD ) failed at the lowest levels of the game, and how that correlates to your device (a heads up: the more expensive the device, the better were the scores in Clockwork Puzzle. So, money and not giving up in the face of a difficult game goes hand in hand? Coincidence?? It is probably that success and money comes with persistence, and Clockwork Puzzle is just as badly designed and difficult as life itself.. Or it is because I just made this result up.. But it would be neat if it was true. )

Let’s dig in the results now shall we:

User Age, Gender, Persona

Flurry, the analytics tool from Yahoo! is quite a giant in analytics and used by over 500k apps around the world, including Clockwork Puzzle. If you are following us you know that we even have a technical blog post about it. Thanks to Furry, although we never track any information of your age or gender, we can have an intelligent estimate based on all the data Flurry has gathered across all the apps and using that benchmark against your tendencies with our app. Here is its estimate on who you are:

So the most likely representative of Clockwork Puzzle audience is a girl in her early twenties, using an iOS device. Wait, what?? And Flurry does not stop there to shock us. Here is more on the personality type and interests:

We do not really know how each personality type is defined exactly (have you noticed the tag “Social influencer” or “Mom” ?) but seeing the casual gamer as the top ranking tag among all was like a sanity check for us. Then there were some surprises here too: Only 4 hardcore gamers among all users, only 4 tech gadget enthusiasts, and only 1 fashionista, and, wait for it, only 1 single!!!!! We thought we knew our friends and family better than this!

So there! Now thanks to Flurry you know how the analytics world, the advertisers and your developer friends see you, dear Eigens. We also learned that Clockwork Puzzle goes well with iOS girls between ages 18-24. So next time when you think of what to say to start up the conversation just try:

Hey, ummmm, can I ask you a favour? My friends made this puzzle game and they are looking for some <insert flattering adjective – like smart!> people to test it. Would you mind giving it a try? It is about a little girl in early 1920s.

Coming next

How do iOS vs Android players act in the face of a challenge: Win/Lose/Restart analysis.. We know we said it last time too but look, we had so many other awesome things to talk about this time, haven’t we?

Stay tuned!

Footnotes

* you are ok, no i didn’t mean you really.. oh does it sound like i am trying to guilt you into playing our game??.. Oh.. well, maybe i am.. huh? good friends don’t do that you say..hmm.. but i wouldn’t need to, if you did play in the first place, right?.. there then, who is not being a good friend now?… … … you know what, you would be in level 12 by now if you have downloaded it instead of arguing about it.. just saying.
]]>https://eigenstudio.it/clockwork-puzzle-user-analysis/feed/0537Clockwork Puzzle: Day 10 analysishttps://eigenstudio.it/clockwork-puzzle-day-10/
https://eigenstudio.it/clockwork-puzzle-day-10/#respondSun, 21 Jun 2015 12:12:59 +0000http://eigenstudio.it/?p=483Read More]]>

… or how come we have more iOS users and they actually did so well!!!

About ten days ago, in a rather emotional post, we have announced the release of our game Clockwork Puzzle to the world of casual mobile gamers. We did not do any marketing work, so the idea was that our friends and families would play it and we could all get a few laughs out of it, and that would be a great way of remembering dear Agostina and her sunny impact on us.

Ratings and christmas gifts

Although we considered the game a learning experience and did not bother with its market performance, we admit that the first days sucked really bad. Even when we searched for the -exact- name of the game it would appear on the 5th page of the results on store!! Actually even the games which had nothing to do with “clockwork” and, we suspected perhaps every other puzzle game on the market appeared before ours. We learned that ratings are the most important factor in the app listings on the store. That is when, desperately, we asked our family members and romantic interests to “please install the damn thing and rate it”. And so they did. Honestly we wanted a real review, not an inflated 5 star like “the perfect game!”, because we knew very well that there were, and still are, so many things to improve in it. But in perfect honesty, we also revealed that their christmas presents next year could correlate with the average ratings we get in some inexplicable way.

Much thanks to these ratings we made it to the first page of the search results for “Clowckwork Puzzle” and something interesting started to happen: We received bug reports from people who are not our friends (thanks, we are still working on the issues!) and we even got a 1 star review from a teenager from Philippines ?? Well, thanks for taking the time!

So now, after ten days, we decided to dig deeper in the statistics of the game that we gathered through Flurry plugin and see what other surprising facts await us, and tried to answer some dumb/petty questions like who did better, Android or iOS users? Phone or Tablet? Boys or girls? (Relax, we didn’t gather gender data, just kidding. Of course girls.) Here are the results:

Who played more?

According to Flurry statistics reports there are about 200 unique players in total, which is a really tiny number for statistics but let us see what we can learn from the analysis keeping this in mind.

It came to us as a big surprise that we have more iOS users than Android, since most of our friends are Android users, and there were quite more clicks to the Android link on the announcement page of the Clockwork Puzzle than the iOS ones. Some possibilities to explain these are

Flurry has issues tracking Android devices

iOS users are more into puzzle games and/or they are more efficient in finding new free games on App Store

Our friends have secret iOS devices we do not know about

Since the game had a previous beta release for Android, many of friends who tried it then did not want to see the final release now. Ehm. Lesson learned about not making a very unfinished beta.

Ok we now have the distribution of the users and sessions they have started (a session is the time span from the opening of the app to going back to mobile home screen or another app). What we see is iOS users gave the game slightly more tries than the Droid ones. But how much each person actually spent playing the game? Well, here is the average session duration for iOS and Droid users:

So the game is catchy only for some 3-4 minutes at a time, as we have expected. By making very short levels indeed we wanted to create a game you can drop and pick back up anytime, let’s say on the metro or while waiting in line somewhere, when most casual gamers play.

Coming next

How do iOS vs Android players act in the face of a challenge: Win/Lose/Restart analysis

We have finally put a stop at CWP development and sent it off the nest to the jungle of app stores. It even has its own page now here on our site and here on Appszoom! The world of mobile games is a messy jungle, with as many as 500 games launched every day on iOS in 2014, and 250 a day on Android [1]. We are ever so grateful to all of you for contributing to its development with your encouragements and feedback! Thank you, Grazie, Tesekkurler, Merci, Hvala, Kiitos, Graciis, Danke, Dziękuję , مرسي , Obrigada, Gracias.

CWP is a tiny but rather difficult game, one that is difficult to learn and difficult to play as the levels quickly get tougher and trickier after introductory ones. When we noticed that the game is not playable by majority of the mobile gamers due to its difficulty level and lack of instructions however, we did not despair. Instead of cursing our lack of expertise in user-interaction, we realised how little we cared about making Clockwork Puzzle for the masses. We made our first game for people like ourselves, like you my friend who is reading this. Take it as a sign that we have been born, bred and buttered amongst the smartest and most resilient of minds that is you.

We have finished the game and put it out there in the world ( well here on AppStore and here on PlayStore ) but we have not broken all bonds with it: We will still follow it for the bugs to fix or for quick improvements you would like to see. We will for sure talk about its development and reveal more of the process code-, modelling-, game mechanics and statistics-wise.

A tiny era has finished for us but has just started for Ago and CWP. Wanna make her happy? Drop us a one line comment down here or reach us here: what has been your favourite part playing it?

Thanks to your feedback, we were able to fix several bugs and we added the features you asked:

Overlays and animations are now displayed on all devices

New and improved starting areas: The selected toy now snaps on the starting area if the finger is close but not exactly on the area. it should not be possible any more to put the car outside starting areas or to drag them around by colliding with other objects

Zoom! Zoom! Zooooom! /li>

Added animation for toys falling off the table

The “silent movie” sections are now correctly playing the first time a level is attempted

Audio on/off setting is now saved. Restarting the game will keep the last audio setting.

A lot of new game mechanics and levels and yes, new toys!

While waiting, you can enjoy a sneak preview of the clockwork puzzle main theme I composed. Hope you like it!

Clockwork Puzzle main theme

And here is a picture of our working environment. E really does not like this photo but was too tired to protest.

First, let’s talk about why we chose Flurry to manage analytics and ads. Well, that’s a little embarrassing to admit but… because it was the easiest things to do! Flurry is already included in the list of cocos2D-x plugins. Among the possible analytics ads plugin that cocos2D-x provides Flurry felt like the easiest to use. Moreover, it has to be said that the plugins section of cocos-2D-x is not being supported much lately, probably because the focus is shifting towards using AnySDK to manage the integration. But already downloading AnySDK proved to be hard, and 99% of the documentation about it is only in Chinese! So we were faced with three options:
1) writing C++ interfaces to the Java and Objective-C for an Analytics/Ads software or 2) use the existing plugin interface stuff, although a little dated or
3) downloading the much adored “ChineseSkill” language learning app to figure out AnySDK

As you can guess, we decided to go for the second solution, and Flurry was the only one working with this outdated plugin support. cocos2D-x ships with Flurry 3.2.1, (the current version being 5.3.0). So we knew we were starting with an outdated version of the plugin. Not ideal, but at least we had something to start with.

Flurry analytics worked out of the box as far as we could see. The only problem (not related to the version of Flurry, but to the way Flurry works) was that each “event” we sent to Flurry to be processed by analytics, such as opening the app, winning a level etc., was displayed on the online dashboard of our Flurry account with a long time delay, varying from one day to one week. That was pretty annoying as we were running some tests to understand what’s going on and how things are working and the feedback to the tests could come with days of delay. Here in Eigen some of us don’t even remember what they (she ) had for lunch the day before so you can imagine how this ultra delay of Flurry event display almost broke the causality barrier for some of us. Moreover, we found out that one cannot delete events from the Flurry dashboard. This means that if you created an event called “FlurryTest” , it will stay there forever. It will have very low event count after a while, but it will stay there (so be careful not to use an embarrassing event name…). The only way to remove events is to wipe everything, that means creating a new app on Flurry, with a new FlurryID, etc…

However, as always, laziness comes with cost. Some features of Flurry were not supported in our old cocos2d-x compatible Version 3.2.1 and ta-taaam: Ads were not working. The solution to the non-working ads was actually pretty simple (simple once you find it, of course). The solution I report here works for android (I didn’t test it yet on iOS but I speculate that it should be very similar).

Basically, the Java Class AdsFlurry (contained in $COCOS2DX_ROOT/plugin/plugins/flurry53/proj.android/src/org/cocos2dx/) does not call the FlurryAds.displayAd method while it should. This means the Ad is actually received but never displayed! The solution is to modify the method “spaceDidReceiveAd” from

We then decided to try updating it all to Flurry 5.3.0. Also this didn’t prove that complicated. What we did was to substitute the Flurry.jar in $COCOS2DX_ROOT/plugin/plugins/flurry53/proj.android/sdk with the newer versions (FlurryAnalytics-5.3.0.jar and FlurryAds-5.3.0.jar), and run the publish.sh tool (this guide proved very useful ).

That’s it for now. As soon as we try the iOS version, we will update this post with the solution. Stay tuned for more tech-posts!